Great article by David Powlison in the most recent email newsletter from 9Marks.
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Good article. This absolutely drives me crazy. We have a huge prayer crisis in some Baptist churches, in particular the church I go to and it’s driving me nuts. I cannot allow this situation to continue if htere’s anything I can do about it. I htink our shallowness in prayer is best summed up by a quote from a book review I did last semester of Dr. Ken Hemphill’s The Antioch Effect:
“Chapter three is devoted to the subject of God connecting prayer and from the beginning gets straight to the heart of the matter. The reason there aren’t more of us at prayer meetings and the reason we don’t pray more is very simple-we don’t really believe in the power of prayer! Hemphill showed that he is no mere men pleaser and cannot be commended enough for daring to write such a fearless (though fairly obvious) assessment. If, as the savior said, a tree can be judged by it’s fruits then the abysmally low numbers who attend prayer meetings in so many churches and the appallingly little time spent in collective prayer are the undeniable and inevitable fruits of a deeply and firmly entrenched lack of belief in what the Bible actually teaches about prayer. We simply don’t believe it. Our prayer deficiencies are not just a prayer failure but ultimately, a faith failure. We don’t grow because we don’t pray and we don’t pray because we simply don’t believe in it, despite all our protestations to the contrary. The sooner this is accepted the sooner we can remedy it by repenting of it. ”
So then the great Baptist prayer crisis is not a prayer crisis at all but rahter a faith crisis!
Great article. Thanks for the link.